Weekly Newsletter

Standard Chartered's venture arm and Sony don't back concepts. They back infrastructure that already works at scale.

Mubadala, Toyota, BlackRock — the marquee names in this round are all foreign.

Equity funding at a seven-year low while debt climbs to 41% of all startup capital — up from 17% in 2019 — looks, on the surface, like founders discovering a new tool.

PalmPay picking Hong Kong over New York or London isn't just a routing decision — it's an admission about where the real appetite for African fintech lives right now.

Getting a banking licence from scratch in East Africa can take years, cost millions, and still fail. Flutterwave's move to acquire existing banks rather than apply for new licences is a direct answer to that problem — buy the regulatory…

The sharpest line in South Africa's draft crypto framework isn't a ban — it's a gap.

A software error inside Nigeria's Inter-Bank Settlement System credited 176 people with money that was never actually sent from anywhere — no account was debited, the funds were conjured by a bug. Most recipients did what anyone would do:…

The headline is a delay. The detail is more instructive.

The most consequential line in Kenya's draft AI guidance isn't about algorithms or investment — it's about accountability.

Airtel Kenya's original licence expired in 2015. What followed was a decade of stopgap arrangements — inherited rights from an acquisition, an out-of-court settlement, a temporary extension — while the company tried to plan a future it…

Most business banking platforms see a merchant only when money arrives. Cloud9's acquisition of Chpter means it now sits inside the WhatsApp conversation where the sale happens — before any payment clears.

The NRS has published a 28-page framework that turns every Nigerian crypto exchange into a tax collector — withholding 1.5% of each purchase directly in the token, before the buyer even sees it in their wallet.

Femi Otedola has already spent over N600 billion of his own money buying into First HoldCo. He's now publicly signalling he wants to go from 25.8% to over 51%.

The task team's most important recommendation isn't the headline unbundling — it's the ring-fencing clause.

40% of Nigerian formal firms now use AI — matching the United States, according to the World Bank. That number is genuinely striking.

INTERPOL's own figures tell the story: Africa reported $484 million in cyberattack losses in 2025, but estimates the real damage at roughly $5 billion. That's a tenfold gap — and it exists almost entirely because 89% of member countries…

Nigeria has secured financing commitments from the World Bank, the African Development Bank and others — $1.6 billion in total — for a fibre project whose implementing company does not legally exist yet.

Capitec just bought Walletdoc — a payments business that resells Capitec Pay to merchants. That puts Capitec in a position most regulators hate: it owns the payment infrastructure that rival providers need to access, and now it also…

Nigeria has roughly 60 times Rwanda's population. Spiro has deployed four times more electric motorcycles in Rwanda.

A R3 billion first close is real money — but in green hydrogen, first closes are just proof that institutional investors are willing to show up, not proof the sector works.

Global firms lining up to apply is genuinely encouraging. But applications aren't licences.

The part of Shotwell's announcement that should keep African mobile operators up at night isn't Starlink from orbit. It's Elon Musk floating compact, low-cost cellular base stations deployable alongside Starlink hardware.

The investor lineup is genuinely interesting — AlphaCode leading, General Catalyst returning, Canal+ coming in fresh. But as I wrote earlier this week, Canal+ is essentially investing in the billing layer its own pay-TV business already…